U.S. / Mexico Border

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The Week’s Chunkiest, Clunkiest, and Slam-Dunkiest Headlines

WAIT, TRUMP FAILED TO LOCK SOMEONE UP? NO!
If there’s a single story that encapsulates the unrealized promise of the Trump administration and the dashed dreams of its supporters, it’s the odd saga of Mexico’s former defense minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos. In October, El General was arrested at LAX by the DEA. Cienfuegos had come to L.A. for a family vacation (hard to believe that a Mexican would consider L.A. to be a “vacation,” as the city has more Mexicans than Mexico), and the DEA was waiting for him. As explained by The Sunday Times, “after years of painstaking investigation the DEA had established that he was a shadowy figure drug traffickers referred to as El Padrino (the Godfather).”

Yep, those plucky DEA agents caught “the Godfather.” But apparently none of them had seen any of the eponymous films. If they had, they’d have known that Godfathers are kinda hard to prosecute; there’s always a corrupt or pliable politico in the mix willing to help them out.

Hey, did somebody mention William Barr?

Yep, last week “a US federal judge acting on the orders of the attorney-general abruptly dropped the case against Cienfuegos, and put him on a plane home to Mexico.”

According to The Times, “speculation is rife” as to why Barr let the Godfather hightail it back to his Meh-hee-co mansion. The general’s release was a major concession to Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who’d been bitching nonstop about the arrest and what it meant to “Mexican sovereignty.” So of course folks are wondering why Trump and Barr “released the crack-en” to please a Hugo Chavez-loving Mexican commiecrat. One unsubstantiated claim is that Obrador had threatened to remove his troops from the border, where they’ve essentially been playing the part of Trump’s “wall” for the past few years, keeping out the various migrant caravans that have made their way up from Central America. Another is that Cienfuegos’ release was a gift to the Mexican president for not recognizing Biden’s election victory.

Trump administration officials told The Times that “they had returned Cienfuegos as a sign of their confidence in Mexico’s justice system and to preserve good relations.”

The reason is probably irrelevant; the arrest and subsequent release of “Godfather” Cienfuegos was the inevitable final southern border act that the Trump saga needed and deserved. Anyone who expected this movie to end without heavy-handed bad-screenwriter irony hasn’t been paying attention.

Trump leaves the international stage with a literal “catch and release” of a criminal Mexican whose arrest might have threatened a human “wall” that Mexico technically built and therefore could withdraw at any time for any reason, as Bill Barr once again failed to lock up any wrongdoers while proving that he can provide cover for swamp creatures in two nations simultaneously.

A perfect ending. Roll credits, cue “Speak Softly, Love.”

BAD DAY FOR BLACK ROCK
Pity the black American…if he’s not being pursued by a racist piece of string, he’s being tormented by a racist…uh…rock?

Yes, racist rocks. Blacks have a difficult relationship with bigoted boulders.

Back in 2011, when then Texas governor Rick Perry was competing in the GOP primary, he was condemned by racial justice advocates because a long time ago Perry’s father had leased a parcel of land and on that land was a rock that years earlier (long before the Perrys leased the land) had been painted with the word “niggerhead.”

When the Perrys leased the land, they painted over the slur.

Here’s where any normal human would expect to see the words “end of story.” But no, ’twas not the end of story. Black activists were furious that the rock had not been destroyed, as the word painted by that anonymous vandal decades earlier had rendered it evil—cursed, if you will—and therefore the rock had to be physically annihilated in order to break the spell and rid the land of the wickedness it had summoned. Removing the word, as the Perry family did, was not enough. The stone itself had to “die.”

The Washington Post devoted 3,000 words to a story about how racist Rick Perry was for not having demolished the boulder. The New York Times declared that the rock should have been reduced to gravel; only then could blacks have been freed from its malevolent influence.

BTW, these are the same news orgs that claim to be in favor of science and against superstition.

Nine years after black Americans fought so bravely against an inanimate slab, yet another racist rock is forcing them to once again lock arms and sing “We Shall Overcrumble.” On the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, sits a seventy-ton boulder known as Chamberlin Rock, in honor of geologist Thomas Chamberlin, a former president of the university. This rock was once referred to as “niggerhead” in a 1925 article in the Wisconsin State Journal. So black students have demanded that the rock be demolished, and the university has agreed.

Even the blacks protesting the stone admit that the 1925 Journal article is the only known time the “nickname” was used. But still, that one instance almost 100 years ago was enough to imbue the boulder with demonic properties.

The rock is “a painful reminder of the history of racism on campus,” claimed the Wisconsin State Journal, even though the slur was spoken not “on campus” but in the pages of…the Wisconsin State Journal. Odd that the stone is being destroyed and not the newspaper. Seems a bit unfair.

Wisconsin Black Student Union President Nalah McWhorter claimed that the boulder is “a constant reminder that we don’t belong here.” One could counter that it’s the desire to destroy a rock because someone called it a name 95 years ago that’s the “reminder” of why McWhorter “doesn’t belong on campus.”

After the rock is either “buried or broken up,” the Black Student Union plans to place “a monument to Black students and the contributions of the Black community” where the boulder once sat.

Hopefully the monument will acknowledge the heroic “contributions” of American blacks in the never-ending war against racist stones.

ALL-ABOARD THE SS UNITY (ACCENT ON THE “SS”)
Well, like they say, “we’re all in this together.”

As Joe Biden mumbles insincerities about “unity” in America, over in Germany, the “unity” is real. The lockdowns and other repressive measures taken by that government in the name of controlling the COVID pandemic have managed to make new allies of old enemies.

True solidarity is here, and the Germans have it!

An anti-lockdown, anti-mask protest in Berlin last week brought out a genuine rogues’ gallery of demonstrators who set aside their longstanding differences for the sake of a greater good. As reported by the AFP, LGBT lightenloaferers waving rainbow flags marched and cavorted alongside hardcore sieg-heiling neo-Nazis, as topless women danced among Evangelical Christians, and Green Party supporters mixed with AfD activists.

Thank you, COVID alarmists and restrictionists, for doing the impossible: bringing together the far left and the far right, the queers and the Nazis, the hippies and the Hitlers, the preachers and the strippers, all joined together in shared anger over the destruction of their freedoms by COVID-exploiting dictocrats.

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Furor.

According to the AFP, the massive Berlin protest consisting of “10,000 demonstrators united by a crumbling faith in institutions and representative democracy” had been organized under the umbrella of an ad hoc movement that refers to itself as “Querdenken,” which means “lateral thinking” (although it also sounds like a gay-themed Kraftwerk tribute band). Querdenken is dedicated to fighting back against the “Corona dictatorship.”

And fighting back against state-mouthpiece “journalists,” too. The organization Reporters Without Borders claims that at least 43 reporters for print and television news organizations were “jostled, harassed, and threatened” by Querdenkeners during the protests last week.

So that’s why the members of the White House press corps were so angered by Trump’s refusal to take questions at last week’s truncated presser…they were robbed of the opportunity to ask him a dozen times in a row if he denounces Querdenken.

Simon Teune, a sociologist and “protest specialist” at Technische Universität Berlin, condemned Querdenken for “turning governments and the media into objects of protest and hatred.”

With all due respect to Herr Professor, it’s a bit more accurate to say that those institutions did that to themselves.

CONFERENCING ON ZOOM PETERS OUT
Sorry, that title should read “Conferencing on Zoom? Peters OUT!”

COVID lockdown Zoom participants just can’t seem to avoid dangling dirlywangers. Apparently, CNN’s Jeffrey “lubin’” Toobin, who’s never had an original idea in his life, also copycatted that whole “wave your willy on Zoom” thing. According to an “in-depth” report on Vice.com, dick flashers and related pervs have become a pervasive, and international, problem for Zoom users:

An Argentinian politician was caught sucking a woman’s breasts on a Zoom call broadcast to the country’s congress. In the UK, a college lecture was flooded with extreme pornography links by the students. Incidents have also been reported in India, where bosses allegedly conducted meetings with their employees in vests and boxers.

Speaking of India, Navin Noronha, the author of the Vice article, is a stand-up comedian from Mumbai. You may have heard some of his classic bits, like the one about the dyslexic Indian man who burned his poop and dumped his bride on the street, or that timeless knock-knock joke:

“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“This is Microsoft Windows tech support, sir. There’s a problem with your computer’s security.”

According to Noronha, it’s become practically impossible for stand-up comedians in India—particularly female ones—to perform Zoom comedy sets without being “Zoombombed” by dicks. Why this is an especially egregious problem in India, Noronha doesn’t attempt to address. One possible explanation is that the unwanted dong-swingers are just trying to show off their comedic impressions of Ganesha. When you’re an impressionist in a country where the native accent is one that everyone else in the world loves to spoof, you really have to step up your game.

Noronha laments the fact that after several of his female stand-up friends were flashed on Zoom, the company behind the app refused to take action to identify and punish the offenders. That might not be such a bad thing, though. Even China, with its massive electronic security state, has yet to create software that can identify a person via video footage of his exposed member.

And frankly, that’s probably for the best.

One of Noronha’s fellow comedians claims that a Zoom flasher interrupted her you-go-girl feminist comedy set.

That was probably for the best, as well.

The punchline of the story is that Noronha is gay, billing himself as “India’s only openly queer comedian.”

A gay man angry about seeing too many dicks?

Now, that’s funny.

MINNEAPOLSCHWITZ: THE WOIST CAMP EVAH!
Make that 6 million and one from now on, thank you very much.

George Floyd, America’s favorite black martyr, is being retroactively added to the list of Holocaust victims. And why not? Nobody rioted when Elie Wiesel or Simon Wiesenthal died. What losers! A man like Floyd, filled as he was with pride, integrity, and lethal doses of fentanyl, absolutely deserves to be added to the holy scroll of Holocaust casualties (the fact that Floyd wasn’t born until almost thirty years after World War II notwithstanding). At least that’s the view of the Holocaust Memorial and Education Resource Center of Florida, which last week opened a new exhibit dedicated to Minneapolis’ favorite dyspneic son.

“We have produced this so that people can come and look these individuals in the eye. So you come face to face with people, so you can really experience the feelings that they were feeling,” the center’s assistant director Lisa Bachman told the Jewish News. And indeed, who can argue with the notion that only by looking into the eyes of a 21st-century black American drug addict and petty criminal from Minnesota can one truly experience the feelings of Polish Jews in the Łódź Ghetto in 1943?

That really does make perfect sense, at least to people suffering from oxygen deprivation. Hence the museum will offer visitors the option of having their necks knelt upon, to better experience the new exhibit’s commentary, which is best appreciated with mild brain damage.

The exhibition features 45 photos of black people looking sad because George Floyd died. That’s literally it. That’s literally the totality of the exhibit. The Center hopes to give each visitor the feeling of what it’s like to be a casting director cycling through headshots while assembling a crowd scene for the next Jordan Peele film.

Critics on social media have slammed the new exhibit for distorting the meaning of the Holocaust, insulting the memory of Hitler’s victims, and tacitly comparing American law enforcement officers to Nazis. To which assistant director Bachman excitedly replied, “Bingo!”

Fortunately, the exhibit is free to the public, because it might be asking a bit much to expect folks to pay money to see a roomful of sad black faces when they can see the same thing at no cost by visiting any Popeye’s at closing time.